Crime, gender and consumer culture in nineteenth century england

PART Is DESTROYING THE ‘NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS’1 Ready Money Only: Small Shops and New Retail Methods 17 2 Vanity Fairs: The Growth of Bazaars and Fancy Fairs 41 4 The Culture of Fraud an

CRIME, GENDER AND

CONSUMER CULTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Crime, Gender and

Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright© Tammy C Whitlock 2005

The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

A ll rights reserved N o part o f this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

1 Female offenders - England - History - 19th century 2 Women consumers - England

- History -19th century 3 Shoplifting - England - History - 19th century 4 Fraud - England - History - 19th century 5 Retail trade - England - History - 19th century 6 Consumerism - England - History - 19th century 7 Kleptomania 8 England - Social life and customs - 19th century

I Title

364.374'0942'09034

Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication D ata

Whitlock, Tammy C.,

1967-Crime, gender, and consumer culture in nineteenth-century England / Tammy C Whitlock,

p cm - (The history o f retailing and consumption)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7546-5207-6 (alk paper)

1 Retail trade - England - History - 19th century 2 Consumption (Economics) - England - History - 19th century 3 Women consumers - England - History - 19th century 4 Consumer behavior - England - Sex differences - History - 19th century 5 Crime - England - History - 19th century 6 England - Social life and customs - History - 19th century I Title II Series.

HF5429.6.G 72E69 2005

3 0 6.3’0 9 4 2 ’09034— dc22

2004016884 ISBN 13: 978-0-754-65207-6 (hbk)

PART Is DESTROYING THE ‘NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS’

1 Ready Money Only: Small Shops and New Retail Methods 17

2 Vanity Fairs: The Growth of Bazaars and Fancy Fairs 41

4 The Culture of Fraud and the Female Consumer 103

PART II: CRIMINAL CONSUMPTION

5 Shoplifting in Early Nineteenth-Century England 127

6 Mrs McGregor’s Sealskin Jacket: Female Frauds and the Art

7 Solving the Problem of the Criminal Consumer:

B ib lio g ra p h y 2 2 7

The History of Retailing and

Consumption General Editor’s Preface

It is increasingly recognised that retail systems and changes in the patterns

of consumption play crucial roles in the development and societal structure of economies Such recognition has led to renewed interest in the changing nature

of retail distribution and the rise of consumer society from a wide range of academic disciplines The aim of this multidisciplinary series is to provide a forum

of publications that explore the history of retailing and consumption

Gareth Shaw University o f Exeter, UK

List of Figures

1.1 This elaborate bill heading from Nias and Company clearly

illustrates ladies both ‘window shopping’ and counter shopping in

the large retail establishment Nias and Co Wholesale and Retail Linen Drapers, 1825 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson

2.1 The Pantechnicon, Halkin Street, London Bodleian Library,

University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection; Bazaars and Sales 483.1 ‘FIRE! In St Paul’s Churchyard’ (poster), 1853 Bodleian Library,

University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection; Bazaars and Sales 91

6.1 Girl o f the Period Miscellany (cover), 1869 Bodleian Library,

University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection; Fashion 14 1567.1 Ladies Don’t Go Thieving’ (ballad), Mullins, Red Cross Street Printer Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection;

Johnson Ballads 1308 This ballad directly refers to the Ramsbotham

For reading and discussing various parts of this manuscript Ellen Furlough, Anya Jabour, Leslie Allen, Julie Early, and Margot Finn deserve special recognition To Rebecca Stem, Amy Williams, and Amy Masciola, I am grateful for generously sharing their research Words cannot express my gratitude to Carolyn White for her commentary and for giving me such an excellent start in British history And to T Wayne Beasley, thank you for helping to inspire my love

of history in the first place For comparative comments and especially for

tolerating numerous discussions of shoplifting, the staff of the Journal o f Southern

History—Patricia Bixel, Evelyn Nolen, Elizabeth Turner, Patricia Burgess and

John Boles—forever have my gratitude And lest I forget, my parents, Janet and David Hall, who are to blame for instilling an early love of learning

Thanks to all of those who commented at conferences held by the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Southern Conference on British Studies, North American Conference on British Studies, and Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association

Finally, I would like to thank my husband Michael for his support over the seemingly endless years of graduate work and postgraduate work and my son Miles for providing comic relief Last, but not least, thanks to Maeve for waiting until I finished the manuscript

than one’s taste in clothing In Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey the silent

calculations of material status at the meeting of two old friends in Bath suggests the significance:

Mrs Thorpe, however, had one great advantage as a talker over Mrs Allen, in a family o f children; and when she expiated on the talents o f her sons, and the beauty

o f her daughters,— when she related their different situations and views— that John was at Oxford, Edward at Merchant-Taylors’, and William at sea,— and all o f them more beloved and respected in their different station than any other three beings ever were, Mrs Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press on the unwilling and unbelieving ear o f her friend, and was forced to sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that the lace on Mrs Thorpe’s pelisse was not half

so handsome as that on her ow n.1

Around the time that Austen was penning Northanger Abbey, her own family was

forced to acknowledge the importance of a bit of lace when they became involved

in a sensational trial

In August 1799 Jane Austen’s aunt, Jane Perrot,2 bought some lace in a haberdasher’s shop in the town of Bath where Perrot’s husband was being treated for gout This simple purchase led Perrot into an ordeal that lasted until March of the following year Shortly after buying the lace, a shop woman ran after Perrot accusing her of taking another card of lace with her parcel, and when Perrot handed over the parcel, the extra lace was in it The discovery led to Perrot’s arrest

1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 29 Northanger

Abbey was written between 1798 and 1803; during that period Jane Austen spent time

with her uncle and aunt in Bath See Marilyn Butler’s introduction, Ibid.

2 Jane Austen’s mother’s older brother, James, adopted this surname when he became

the heir o f his great-uncle Thomas Perrot See W.J.B Owen, ‘De Quincey and

Shoplifting,’ The Wordsworth Circle, 21, no 2 (Spring 1990), 73.

2 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19™ C ENGLAND

for shoplifting—a serious offense in 1799 Any thief convicted of stealing items worth over five pounds was liable to hanging While Perrot waited for her trial in Ilchester gaol, a scandal ensued pitting the lady, Mrs Perrot, against the shopman, Charles Filby and his employer, Elizabeth Gregory Although Perrot’s lawyers had difficulty casting doubt on the character of the shop owner, Elizabeth Gregory, they managed to disparage the reputation of Filby who had twice gone bankrupt in his haberdashery business before being reduced to becoming an assistant A bevy

of character witnesses, including women who claimed to have found extra goods planted or mistakenly added to their parcels in the same shop, led to an acquittal The accusation that Filby had mistakenly or purposely wrapped extra items in ladies’ parcels particularly weighed in Perrot’s favor: “[Miss Blagrave] bought the veil from Filby, she went home, and on opening the parcel, she found two in the said parcel, next day she went to the shop to return the v e il ”3 The questions raised by this case remained an item of debate throughout the nineteenth century.4

In this repeating drama of English consumerism, it was often difficult to tell precisely who was cheating whom Were dishonest shopkeepers preying upon innocent ladies, hoping their husbands would pay dearly to avoid scandal, or were the ladies not to be trusted among the ever-increasing goods on display in English shops?5 In her trial, Perrot had asked, “Placed in a situation the most affluent with

a supply so ample, that I was left rich, what inducement could I have to commit such a crime?”6 In the decades that followed, various public discussions and trials recorded in newspaper reports, pamphlets, and periodicals reflected this tension over retail crime.7 In many of the cases, like Perrot’s, a respectable lady was shopping alone when an accusation of crime suddenly transformed a normally mundane transaction If Jane Perrot had been caught shoplifting at the end of the century instead of the beginning, she would probably have been diagnosed as a

3 Trial o f Jane Leigh Perrot, at Taunton Assizes, on Saturday the 29th o f March, 1800;

Charged with Stealing a C ard o f Lace, in the Shop o f Elizabeth Gregory, H aberdasher

& Milliner, o f the City o f Bath (Bath: W Gye, 1800; reprint in British Trial Series„

Lincoln’s Inn Library; London: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd, 1990), microfiche, 18.

4 Ibid See Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Household Wreck,’ Blackwood's Edinburgh

M agazine, January 1838, 1-32; Owen, ‘De Quincey and Shoplifting,’ 72-76; and the

trial report in the British Trials series complete with diagrams.

5 In many ways, the kleptomania diagnosis and attitudes toward women as shoplifters has changed little from its inception in the nineteenth century See Loren E Edwards,

Shoplifting and Shrinkage Protection f o r Stores (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas, 1958); William Stekel, Peculiarities o f Behavior: Wandering Mania, Dipsomania, Cleptomania, Pyromania and A llied Impulsive Acts (New York: Boni

and Liverwright, 1924); and Marcus J Goldman, ‘Kleptomaniac: Making Sense o f the

Nonsensical,’ American Journal o f Psychiatry 148, 8 (August 1991): 986-997.

6 Trial o f Jane Leigh Perrot, 17.

7 The richest sources for this information remain newspaper accounts, trials, and magazine articles along with related stories in literature The government debates over regulating consumption are haphazard and seem to be inspired by occasional “panics” especially those over pure food and drugs, but a careful reading also demonstrates a great concern over fraud in general and its prevalence in an urban, anonymous society.

INTRODUCTION 3

“kleptomaniac,” but this option was not available to her or her counsel in 1800 Beginning as a genderless, if not classless, ailment, the kleptomania diagnosis slowly developed throughout the nineteenth century to become the favored explanation for cases of female middle-class shoplifting The shifts in the perception of shoplifting and other retail crimes occurred as a result of the changing landscape of English consumption in the nineteenth century

The History of Shopping and Retail Crime in England

As the industrial kingpins of England concentrated on larger factories, better machinery, and cheaper labor to spur the expansion of the British economy, a less noticed transformation occurred in arcades, bazaars, and small shopfronts across England Sometimes overlooked in the history of English capitalism, the development of a new kind of consumer culture laid the foundations for the later feminine world of materialist fantasy—emphasizing display and consumption—

that enchanted fin de siecle shoppers Accused by such luminaries as William

Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope of selling without substance, retailers incorporating new methods, which included bazaar shopping, ‘cheap shops,’ and large emporiums with open displays, grew in popularity and were the progenitors

of the great department stores Inspired by class aspirations, the women who inhabited this new realm of conspicuous consumption with its ever-expanding array of goods provided the driving force for the new culture, a culture that created

a host of anxieties for English society Unchecked consumerism led to fears of crime and fraud perpetrated by both buyers and sellers Women’s involvement in this seedy business of selling was especially troubling to middle-class, male commentators

If England was once a nation of shopkeepers, by the 1860s, critics contended that the country had become a nation of frauds and shoplifters with women in the lead of those satisfied with the pursuit of selling without substance For both buyer and seller, the uninhibited flow of goods in English retail trade encouraged morally dubious as well as respectable profit making.8 Debates over new selling methods and heightened prosecutions of retail crime during the first three-quarters of the century illustrate the unsettling effect of the already burgeoning consumer culture

on gender and class roles before the grand magasins opened their doors.

8 See Richard Altick, The Shows o f London (London: Belknap Press), 1978; Tony

Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’ New Formations (Spring 1988): 73-102; Asa

Briggs, Victorian Things (London: B T Batsford), 1988; Leonore Davidoff and

Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes; Men and Women o f the English M iddle Class, 1780­

1850 (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1986) for the growth in retail,

profusion o f goods, and enterprise oriented toward public consumption.

4 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 th C ENGLAND

With a rapidly growing economy, English consumption underwent disturbing changes in the early nineteenth century, as a German visitor to London reported home in 1814:

The uninterrupted range o f shops that line both sides o f the street, prevents you indeed from looking upwards, for here you discover wealth and magnificence that you would in vain look elsewhere for Here costly shawls from the East Indies, there brocades and silk-tissues from China, an ocean o f rings, watches, chains, bracelets, and aigrettes, ready-dresses, ribbons, lace bonnets, and fruit from all the zones o f the habitable world— attract, tempt, astonish, and distract your eyes.9

In the nineteenth century smaller, family run shops began to give way to larger, multiple-employee shops Businesses adopted innovative retail practices such as cash sales and openly marked pricing of goods Shops used elaborate window dressing and aggressive advertisements to attract customers These larger scale, ready-money establishments—especially linen drapers’ and haberdashers’ shops— served as transitional forms in the evolution of the department store and modem consumer culture

Other innovations in nineteenth-century retail developed in the exotically named bazaars Beginning just after the Napoleonic wars, charity and commercial shopping bazaars used techniques such as tempting open displays, flower shows, and entertaining dioramas to attract visitors Innovations credited to the opening of

the grand magasins developed first in bazaars, markets staffed, patronized and

often stocked by women For upper-class ladies, the charity bazaar or fancy fair afforded opportunities to showcase their artistic talents through the sale of watercolors, embroidery and wax models, while they fulfilled a social welfare function and replaced older methods of charity Perhaps more importantly, bazaars gave aristocrats and selected members of the middle class an opportunity to exhibit

themselves and to display their class pretensions on a public stage For the middle-

class and working-class women who worked in commercial bazaars, it was a chance at a livelihood—a slim piece of the nineteenth-century entrepreneurial ideal Parliamentary petitions, newspaper reports, and trials illustrate the curiously exhibitionist nature of these new open markets and the way they helped to feminize the consumer experience as well as make way for consumer culture on an even grander scale at the end of the nineteenth century

The success of the new bazaars and drapery emporiums, along with their familiar and innovative approaches to retail, elicited fears that businesses were defrauding customers in their pursuit of profit Observers ranging from satirical ballad writers to journalists accused the new shops of undermining the character of English retail trade and duping the consumer into buying worthless and

9 Letters From Albion, Vol I (London: Gale, Curtis, and Fenner, 1814), 79-80 See also Simon Jervis, ‘Rudolph Ackerman,’ in London: World City, 1800-1840, ed Celina

Fox (New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1992): 97-110 for a discussion o f the profusion o f goods in the early nineteenth century.

INTRODUCTION 5

misrepresented goods In court cases, letters to the Times, and fiction, retailers

were charged with blackmailing respectable ladies by planting goods on them and then threatening to prosecute for shoplifting.10 According to middle-class commentators, the new shops preyed upon the gullible female shopper and destroyed the previously sterling character of English shopkeepers by threatening

to turn a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of frauds

According to critics, the fraudulent atmosphere of English shops corrupted the consumer as well as the retailer Respectable women were compared to prostitutes

in their materialism, and wives were told that if they went out alone and something dreadful happened (like being wrongfully accused of theft), it was their fault.11 These fears may have arisen partly in connection with the switch from home production to commercial production, but there is also a noted discomfort about women’s obvious economic role as new consumers and their power over the family purse.12 While Victorian men were encouraged to be tigers of capitalism as wage-eamers and businessmen, Victorian society was not willing to accept the changes that women’s new role as consumers brought Fearing and warning women against exposure in the public sphere of shops, critics, especially journalists and satirists, also characterized the female consumer as a shopping demon allowing nothing to prevent her enjoyment of opportunities to consume, or

by browsing, to leisurely enjoy the shopping culture created for her at the expense

J.M Dent, 1994); a play, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Charity Bazaar: An

Allegorical Dialogue,’ (Edinburgh, 1866); various writings in The Comic Almanack,\ from 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991) However, John Tallis’s London Street

Views (London: John Tallis, 1838-40) not surprisingly, lauds the changes in London’s

consumer landscape John Tallis, London Street Views.

11 See Gary Dyer, ‘The ‘Vanity Fair’ o f Nineteenth-Century England: Commerce,

Women, and the East in the Ladies’ Bazaar,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 1991): 196-222; and Judith R Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight;

Narratives o f Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1992).

12 See notes 1 and 7.

13 Both Elaine Abelson and Judith Walkowitz have looked at the problems created by women’s public role as consumers in the late nineteenth century; however, no one has yet explored the tensions caused by the female buyer in this earlier, formative period

Elaine S Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: M iddle-Class Shoplifters in the

Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight See also Jane H Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins o f American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2002) for the American perspective on women’s increasing forays into the public world

o f consumption.

6 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19™ C ENGLAND

Women participated not only as legitimate shoppers in this emerging culture of consumption in the nineteenth century but also as retail criminals who acquired goods without purchasing them With items so easy to plunder in bazaars and even

in shops where customers were frequently shown a number of articles at one time—the customer was often also the thief.14 For their part, many customers used false names and false credit to acquire merchandise.15 With few laws and regulations controlling businesses and protecting consumers, English retail trade became a battle between wary shoppers and shopkeepers fearful of losing their stock with the identity of the female consumer hanging in the balance In response

to these depredations, retailers began to form trade protection societies in the late eighteenth century, a movement that quickly expanded from London retailers to national organizations in the nineteenth century In their confidential circulars, trade protection societies named and described persons who had defrauded them or were believed to be shoplifters.16 Victorians dealt with retail crime through various methods including trade protection societies, regulatory laws, criminal law changes, and constructing an identity for the problematic middle-class shoplifter.17

14 Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving explores later nineteenth-century shoplifting, but

the concerns over shoplifting existed much earlier— especially in England For detailed accounts o f this earlier growth in consumer culture see Gary Dyer, ‘The ‘Vanity Fair’

o f Nineteenth-Century England,’ 196-222; Hilary M Schor, ‘Urban Things: The Mystery o f the Commodity in Victorian Literature’ (paper presented at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on The Nineteenth-Century City: Global Contexts, Local Productions, Santa Cruz, California, 7-8 April 1995); and

N icole Tonkovich, ‘Foreign Markets in Domestic Locations: Frances Trollope’s Cincinnati Bazaar, 1828-1830’ (paper presented to the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth- Century Studies Conference, Massachusetts Institute o f Technology, 1996).

15 See especially Margot Finn, ‘Fair Trade and Foul: Swindlers, Shopkeepers, and the Use and Abuse o f Credit in the Nineteenth Century’(paper presented to the North American Conference on British Studies meeting, October 1995) for her case studies.

16 James Henry Dixon, A Statement o f Facts In Reference to the City o f London Trade

Protection Society (13, Swithin’s Lane,) and the Mode in Which it Discharges it Pecuniary Obligations (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal exchange, 1851): 1-11; City o f London Trade Protection Circular (London) April 1848-November 1849; ‘The

Amalgamated Societes,’ City o f London Trade Protection Circular (London) 28

October 1848; ‘Metropolitan Institutue for Protection o f Trade,’ Trade Protection

R ecord (London) 25 August 1849; Society for Prosecuting Felons, Forgers, Shoplifters, Domestic Thieves and Persons Giving False Character to Servants; also for Defraying the Expenses o f Advertisements, Hand Bills, and Rewards, March 1767,

‘Police and Public Security,’ Box I, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford; Sherboume Association for the Protections o f Property, 1824 ‘Police and Public Security,’ Box I, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford; Radwinter Association for the Protection o f Property, 1831, ‘Police and Public Security,’ Box I, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford.

17 There were numerous government attempts to deal with this consumer culture unleashed See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Metropolitan Fairs: a Case Study in the

Social Control o f Leisure,’ in Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed A.P

Donajgrodzki (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 163-184; Steve Inwood, ‘Policing

INTRODUCTION 7

In their warnings of known frauds and shoplifters, the trade societies were reacting to the perception of a growing criminal consumption In one notorious example in 1844, Jane Tyrwhitt supposedly secreted a two-shilling microscope up her sleeve at a popular London bazaar Her trial prompted an avalanche of arguments and outrage in the media Tyrwhitt, who had family connections to the aristocracy, claimed that the unscrupulous owners had framed her The case

sparked heated debate and emotional letters in the Times, demonstrating fears not

only about shoplifters but also about shop owners: businesses were defrauding the customers just as the customers were trying to get away with the goods

This debate, along with other shoplifting trials and fictional accounts of the era, illustrates the uneasy relationship between women and consumer culture in this period The role of women as aggressive consumers clashed with their home- centered image, and their role in retail crime complicated class division Fraught with class tension, images of ‘cheap shopkeepers’ searching shopping ladies or planting goods on them terrified the middle classes just as lower-class shoplifters posing as ladies alarmed shopkeepers Middle-class shoplifting was problematic before the department store, and the gendered image of the shoplifter was already developing before the wide acceptance of kleptomania in the later nineteenth century The Tyrwhitt case and similar trials of this era shows how women’s apparently increasing role in consumer culture, and consequently consumer crime, shook their domestic image, blurred the divisions that formed class identities, and laid the groundwork for what became the kleptomania diagnosis In a less well- publicized case in 1859, the same Jane Tyrwhitt received very different treatment when tried for fraudulently ordering goods under false names “Lady” thieves like Tyrwhitt were joined by a host of other less famous and more or less respectable women and men committing retail theft and fraud.18

Contemporary Scholarship

Once firmly linked to the rise of genteel consumption in the eighteenth century, Linda Levy Peck now asserts that the growth in luxury consumption began in the sixteenth century.19 Peck’s work complicates the dominant explanation of

London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829-1850,’ London

Journal, 15, no 2 (1990): 129-146; Markham V Lester, Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment f o r Debt, and Company Winding-up in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Anthony Ogus, Regulation: Legal Form and Economic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

18 See Times (London) 1820-1879 I have also found about 50 fraud cases that deal

specifically with shoppers (women) defrauding retailers by various methods including false names and addresses, false currency, and building credit with the name o f important ‘acquaintances’ established in the town.

19 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Luxury and War: Reconsidering Luxury Consumption in Seventeenth-Century England’ [Presidential Address: The North American Conference

on British Studies], Albion, 34,1 (Spring 2002): 1-23.

8 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 th C ENGLAND

consumer culture as a product of the gentry of the eighteenth century found in John Brewer and Roy Porter’s work.20 Nineteenth-century historians of Europe, England and America see the next great leap in consumption taking place with the invention

of the department store.21 The role of shopper, whether it be manipulated victim or empowered pleasure seeker remains under debate in the works of Victoria De Grazia, Ellen Furlough, Margot Finn and others.22 This study links the consumption of the early modem period so well detailed by Peck, Brewer and Porter with the commodity culture of the later Victorian era and demonstrates the key role women played in this transition

The treatment of shoplifting as a crime highlights social discomfort with the public role of women in the English economy and their primary role in consumer culture.23 Recent scholarship on the phenomenon of the department store by Elaine Abelson, Michael Miller, and Patricia O’Brien emphasizes this tension However,

middle-class shoplifting and other middle-class retail crime did not emerge with

the advent of the department store, but appeared much earlier.24 Gareth Shaw and

20 John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World o f Goods (London:

Routledge, 1993); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J H Plumb The Birth o f a

Consumer Society: The Commercialization o f Eighteenth-Century England

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Loma Weatherhill, Consumer

Behavior and M aterial Culture in Britain, 1660-1720 (Cambridge, 1988); Carole

Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990) See

also Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality,

Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London,’ Journal o f

British Studies, 41, 1 (Jan., 2002): 23-57.

21 Erika D Rappaport, “The Halls o f Temptation’: Gender, Politics, and the

Construction o f the Department Store in Late Victorian London,’ Journal o f British

Studies 35, 1 (1996): 58-83; William R Leach, ‘Transformations in a Culture o f

Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925,’ The Journal o f American

H istory 71, 2 (1984): 319-42; T J Jackson Lears, and Richard Wrightman Fox, eds., The Culture o f Consumption: Critical Essays in American History (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1983); Michael B Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and

the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

22 Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex o f Things: Gender and Consumption in H istorical Perspective (Berkeley: University o f California Press,

1996); Margot Finn, ‘Debt and Credit in Bath’s Court o f Requests, 1829-39,’ Urban

History 21, 2 (1994): 211-36; Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Leslie Camhi,

‘Stealing Femininity: Department Store Kleptomania As Sexual Disorder’ Differences

5, 2 (1993): 27-50; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser,

Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985); Rosalind H Williams, Dream

Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University

o f California Press, 1982).

23 See especially Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight.

24 Many authors focus on the post-1850s era as the most expansive in consumer culture

See W Hamish Fraser, The Coming o f the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (Hamden,

Connecticut: Archon Books, 1981); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture o f

Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford

INTRODUCTION 9

John Benson’s studies of overall retail growth in the nineteenth century reveal that retail evolution was not one great forward march to the department store, but a complex growth of competing systems of various sizes.25 Examining the anxiety over retail crime that paralleled the economic growth of the nineteenth century provides important insights not only into the early development of consumer culture, but also into the changing position and characterization of women in this culture and its effects on class identity, medicine, and English law.26

Despite England’s lead in many aspects of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, most of the historical studies of women and retail crime have concentrated

on France and the United States linking consumer crime to late nineteenth-century consumption Elaine Abelson’s study of middle-class shoplifters in the postbellum United States focuses on the connections between consumer culture, the rise of department stores, and an apparently growing incidence of “lady” thieves Abelson concluded that society avoided the critique of consumer capitalism that middle- class shoplifting should have elicited by blaming the women instead: the problem

of shoplifting was feminized and categorized in a way that circumvented a critique

of the new consumer society Leslie Camhi’s study of the later development of kleptomania centered on urban, middle-class, female consumers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France For Camhi, there was an intimate connection between kleptomania, consumerism, and feminine identity Femininity itself became a sort of commodity Patricia O’Brien found kleptomania connected to department stores in France, and asserts that this diagnosis was one of the cornerstones of the rise of the medical professional in court This argument also appears in Michael Miller’s work.27

University Press, 1990); Loeb, Consuming Angels The development o f the

department store remains the focus as the impetus for change in consumer culture by continental and American scholars See Leach, Transformations in a Culture o f Consumption,’ 319-342; Miller, The Bon Marche; Rappaport, ‘The Halls o f

Temptation’, 58-83; Williams, Dream Worlds.

25 John Benson and Gareth Shaw, eds., The Evolution o f Retail Systems, c l8 0 0 - I 9 ! 4

(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992).

26 Taking a cue from Jean Christophe Agnew, ‘Coming up for air: consumer culture in

historical perspective,’ in Consumption and the World o f G ood„ ed John Brewer and

Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 19-39 and other more recent scholarship, I depart from the older mostly negative view o f the rise o f mass consumption as an overall evil that turned consumers (especially women) into passive, manipulated addicts o f the new abundance.

27 See Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving; Camhi, ‘Stealing Femininity,’ 27-50; Miller, The Bon Marche Insanity as a factor in criminal trials has a long history See John Haslam, M edical Jurisprudence As It Relates to Insanity, According to the Law o f

England (London: 1817); Roger Smith, Trial By M edicine:Insanity and Responsibility

in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1981) Patricia

O ’Brien notes the increasingly specific group covered by the diagnosis most frequently made about shoplifters in the nineteenth century in Patricia O ’Brien, ‘The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century

10 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19™ C ENGLAND

British historians have paid little attention to shoplifting as a crime, shopkeeper fraud, or the diagnosis of kleptomania as a historical development specific to the later nineteenth century However, Margot Finn’s ongoing work on consumer debt is highlighting the important role of women who were usually seen

as passive consumers and nominal actors in the Victorian economy.28 Both Erika

Rappaport in Shopping for Pleasure and Judith Walkowitz in City o f Dreadful

Delight, explore the aura of danger surrounding the female shopper of the

Victorian era.29 Definitions of femininity, class, medicine, the economy, and the Victorian struggle with public and private all play a part in the anxiety about retail crime A close examination of these problems also reflects the overall trends in punishment and English law, especially concerning women, in the nineteenth century These consumer crimes fit into the evolution of English crime and punishment described by Martin Wiener and Lucia Zedner who stress the shift away from harsh physical punishment to imprisonment and the medicalization of women’s crime.30 With the passage of Romilly’s bill in 1820, shoplifting ceased to

be a hanging offense However, women still suffered imprisonment and, more rarely, transportation, for shoplifting offenses Responses to the female, middle-

France,’ Journal o f Social History 17 (1983): 65-67 Those diagnosed as kleptomaniacs were increasingly middle-class women.

28 See Finn, ‘Debt and credit in Bath’s court o f requests, 211-236; Finn, ‘Fair Trade and Foul’; Margot Finn, ‘Victorian Women as Consumer Debtors: Theory and Practice’ (presented to the North American Conference on British Studies meeting, Montreal, October 1, 1993) Also women’s power as consumers and consumer criminals is related to their position as both married and unmarried women under the

law See Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian

England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

29 See Erika D Rappaport, Shopping f o r Pleasure: Women in the Making o f London s

West End (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001); Walkowitz, City

o f Dreadful Delight.

30 Overall, women’s participation in retail crime seems to highlight general trends in Victorian justice including the decreasing seriousness o f punishment for property

crimes, especially petty crimes, over the century See J.M Beattie, Crime and the

Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton University Press, 1986); V.A.C Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford University

Press, 1994) Secondly, they illustrate the change from moralization to medicalization

o f crime See Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, law, and p o licy in

England, 1830-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

There may also be a connection to the ‘disappearance’ o f women in the criminal process in the nineteenth century in the sense that shoplifting was a severely under­ reported crime See Malcolm M Feely and Deborah L Little, ‘The Vanishing Female:

The Decline o f Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912,’ Law & Society Review

25, no 4 (1991): 719-757 Lastly, fraud on both sides o f the counter is tied to the

nineteenth century’s relatively unrestrained capitalism See George Robb, White-collar

Crime in Modern England; Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Crime, Capitalism and the British Economy

The Nature o f Capitalism

Since in theory capitalism is based on the idea of meeting need through better and more efficient means of production, criminal consumption like shoplifting and fraud would seem to be a subversion of Adam Smith’s dream However, especially after initial demands are met in industries like textiles in the 1700s, production in the nineteenth century is more concerned with minor improvements in machinery

or methods, producing ever cheaper staples, and creating greater choice The liberal use of aniline dyes in the 1860s is a good example of adding choice by providing the usual goods in a variety of bold new colors Even with these less demand-oriented approaches, markets become saturated in the nineteenth century leading to the infamous bust cycles so well catalogued by writers like Elizabeth

Gaskell in her novel North and South For the nineteenth century, overproduction

is a reality Overproduction combined with increasing retail competition— especially that provided by urbanization and emporiums—leads to unsold goods Once simple demand is met, retailers and producers have to either market goods to

a new class of shoppers via the cheaper or discount emporiums or create more

demand with display and marketing In the end, successful capitalism (in the sense

of an exponentially expanding market) is not about adopting a particular method of production or distribution, but about expanding markets by simultaneously creating demand while continually democratizing goods

Class and Status

In a post-capitalist economy like the one developing in the nineteenth century, the role of status is not the same as in earlier periods of English history During the era

of the famous Elizabethan sumptuary laws prohibiting the wearing of certain luxurious clothing, the problem was not a mass of consumers, but a small class of wealthy merchants brokering for aristocratic power By the 1800s aristocrats were losing power if not all of their prestige Likewise, the shift to moveable property

12 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 C ENGLAND

made status more difficult to determine and therefore more important for the rising middle classes Although luxury consumption is important for higher status, it is too narrow a base for the nineteenth century’s economies of scale Further complicating matters is that class and status are constantly shifting socially, culturally, and economically In spite of criticism by moralists—goods become increasingly important in the recognition of status and class because goods help symbolize outward evidence of moveable property

The Problem: “Necessaries ” vs Needs

So how does consumer culture work in conjunction with the creation of status to continue to support an ever expanding post-capitalist economy in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century? The problems are multi-fold: the cost and status enhancing ability of the goods fluctuate because (1) stores must try and convince more and more consumers to make seemingly unnecessary purchases once an original demand is met; (2) the democratization of luxury provided by mass production and cheaper bulk retail constantly threatens the boundaries of both the middle class and the gentry; and (3) when cheaper versions of fashions inevitably fall into working-class hands, the middle class and gentry are forced to

“pull the ladder up” and change to something new—as well as implementing social control measures like changing rules for employees like servants and shifting their own class etiquette Therefore goods make unstable class boundaries because they are in constant flux As they become cheaper, more or a different type are soon required Also, to compete and constantly reverify status and hold those boundaries, middle-class women especially recognize that fripperies are really

necessaries after all The problem is compounded by the nouveau riche who fail to

absorb all the fluctuating rules of acquisition that constantly reverify class status, and simply buy new and cheaply made goods without understanding the “rules” of using them This problem is partially addressed by a rise in etiquette and self-help manuals

So, the reason that the acquisition of goods is not perfectly equivalent to social status is the constant fluctuation of boundary guardians like changing fashions as a response when cheaper versions are created (based on previously more expensive items); class bound rituals for use that are also being constantly exposed by etiquette manuals, and the changing amount of goods required to hold status—i.e not just the “right” dress, but the right number in the right colors Goods do equal status, but in a socially and culturally specific way that provides those striving or guarding status with the appearance of stability on the quicksand foundation of changing social boundaries The success of consumer capitalism depends on both the ever changing nature of goods-based status and the appearance of the stability

of that status at any one point in time Most importantly, society’s main consumers, women, begin to recognize the importance of goods and their definition, especially among middle-class women, expands over the century to include more and more

items as necessary This need was not simply a rationalization of the individual

shopper; it was real In an urban, or suburban, post-capitalist society, families and

Trollope’s satire of an English drapery emporium, The Struggles o f Brown, Jones,

and Robinson.

The concerns over retail crimes like shoplifting, consumer fraud, and retailer fraud as exhibited by the kleptomania debate, the ‘cheap shopkeeper’ scare, and other criticisms of women in the marketplace hid an even greater concern in nineteenth-century society—anxiety over the new consumer culture The strange new world of profuse abundance and display that appeared in nineteenth-century England alarmed critics with its hollow credo of selling for the sake of selling and seemingly buying for the sake of buying Rather than shying away from this new phenomenon emphasizing cheapness, bargains, variety over quality, and encouraging appearances over realities, women were helping to create and expand this new very public world Criticized at every turn for their participation in charity bazaars, commercial bazaars, linen and haberdashery emporiums, and shopping as

a “sport,” women continued to venture into this ever widening public space of consumption with all its attendant dangers, delights, and opportunities Working- class and lower-middle-class women were entrepreneurs in commercial bazaars— selling and often making their own products Some could even establish their own commercial empires and fashionable London shops Or, more appalling to observers, they might pose as wealthier, more respectable women to gain the luxuries and status that this world of consumption provided Middle-class and upper-class women became vendors of a sort in their own charity bazaars, and they too committed acts of shoplifting and fraud, but not necessarily because of some mental weakness Their own society was redefining need, and class aspirations made a little bit of lace significant indeed to the middle-class woman who did not possess it These related movements in consumer culture gave new employment to women not only as small retailers but also as “matrons” and later shopwalkers who policed theft and fraud on the shop floor Evidence in the records of the debate over this consumer culture and its concomitant anxieties shows a powerful change

in the English economy Women were the key to this transformation

PARTI DESTROYING THE

‘NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS’

Chapter 1

Ready Money Only:

Small Shops and New Retail Methods

What would London be without its shops? How dull to the pedestrian,

on a fin e Sunday in June, is the form al, Quaker-like aspect o f the

shuttered shops o f Fleet Street and the Strand!

— ‘Shopping in London, ’ 1844

Retailing Evolution in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Mrs Moore, a shopkeeper trading haberdasheries in the fashionable London retail area of Grafton Street1 in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century circulated

an extensive handbill to advertise her new wares:

BEST ENGLISH Silk Stockings, Worsted Gaiters, & Cambric Muslin Gloves.

Plain, Tambour, and Japanned Muslins,

Cambric, Lace and Piquet Ditto,

Large Muslin Shawls, Linen ditto, and Veils.

A Fashionable Assortment o f Hats and Bonnets.

Mourning Articles o f every Description.

Ladies Tunbridge Work and Writing Boxes.

The Superior Quality o f the above Goods, she trusts will obtain the Approbation o f her Customers, who may rely on purchasing to peculiar Advantage having arranged her Dealings for READY MONEY ONLY.2

Moore’s handbill illustrates the growing sophistication of English retail Aggressively touting both the variety and quality of her wares, and her competitive prices, a price structure made possible by a business based on cash transactions,3

1 Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914: Where and in What M anner the

W ell-Dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1964), 4.

2 Moore, formerly Clarkson & Moore, ‘Women’s Clothing and Millinery,’ John Johnson Collection, Box I Note: spelling modernized.

3 See especially Hoh-cheung and Loma H Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth

Century England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U Press,1989), 238-239 who connect this

phenomenon to the innovations o f linen drapers.

18 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 th C ENGLAND

shopkeepers like Moore represent the vanguard of English shops in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

All English shopkeepers, however, did not incorporate innovations like advertising, expensive shop fixtures, and cash-only trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Only a small sector of business people in especially competitive trades like retail clothing initiated the new methods that would become the hallmark of nineteenth-century trade.4 Along with these new developments in retailing methods came new settings for selling such as the arcade—a luxurious enclave protected from inclement weather with a variety of shops for the upper- class shopper Despite the adoption of new techniques by some traders, in the eighteenth century most shopkeepers, especially in smaller towns and villages, continued to trade in traditional ways with slow turnover, a limited variety of goods, and on a credit basis Shopping as a leisure activity remained the privilege

of the few prior to the nineteenth century Changes in English shopping in this period served as the basis for nineteenth-century consumer society, but did not affect the bulk of the selling or buying public; these innovative sales techniques were mainly limited to the upper and middling classes The small but growing section of middling folk with their demand for better and wider varieties of consumer goods eventually propelled English consumption into a new era.5

The work of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and Roy Porter among others gives ample evidence that consumer society was already firmly rooted by the 1700s.6 The English home market expanded throughout that century Demand was high and the amount of goods available increasing—fueled in part by England’s growing industry In this boom period, London reigned as England’s retail capital Facing competition from London, provincial shops began to adopt London innovations such as those demonstrated by Moore’s advertisement.7 Market expansion and the concomitant shifts in English retail formed the base of nineteenth-century consumer society in England

The emphasis on consumption as a driving economic force is a recent one in historical scholarship Whether influenced by the impact of Britain’s recent industrial decline or the legacy of nineteenth-century classical economists,

4 71-72, 221-239.

5 Rosalind Williams finds a similar difference between consumption in nineteenth

and pre-nineteenth-century France in Rosalind H Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass

Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, University o f California

Press, 1982), 3.

6 See Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H Plumb, The Birth o f a Consumer Society:

The Commercialization o f Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1982); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World

o f Goods (London: Routledge, 1993) For a similar study focusing on the American

colonies see Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J Albert, eds., O f Consuming

Interests: The Style o f Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press

o f Virginia and United States Capital Historical Society, 1994).

7 Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England, 7, 71 -72.

READY MONEY ONLY: SMALL SHOPS AND NEW RETAIL METHODS 19

historians traditionally focused on production as the key to analyzing economic growth.8 In the past two decades, historians have begun to search for the origins of modem, mass consumer society in the advertisements, shop improvements, and trade developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Mass consumption

is distinguished by the mass production and sale of similarly styled and packaged goods, and a dissociation of a commodity from its means of production The spendthrift attitude of consumers is also an integral part of mass consumption.9 Many historians agree that the engine driving this modem consumption was advertising

More than just placards posting prices or denoting the uses of objects, advertising in a society of mass consumption emphasizes the image associated with a commodity rather than the utility of the commodity itself.10 In Britain, many historians have posited that this mass market originated in the mid-nineteenth century A combination of economic growth providing an increase in living standards for a majority of the population and the impetus of modem advertising marks the era between the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and the First World War

as the beginning of English mass consumer culture According to Hamish Fraser and Thomas Richards, sophisticated sales techniques like advertising dependent on association with desirable images rather than promises of low prices or quality marshaled this growth.11 Others scholars pinpoint the development of the department store as the onset of the era of consumer culture The department stores

of fin de siecle England, France, and America were temples of consumption where

the image of the goods exhibited reigned over their more mundane functions in luxurious displays.12 All of these developments—the Crystal Palace Exhibition,

8 See William Lancaster, The Department Store (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 2; Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England, 6 The

Muis argue that the growth in consumption pre-dates the impetus o f production from industrialization See also pages 44-45.

9 See especially Williams, Dream Worlds, 3.

10 Colin Campbell argues that such “image” advertising is the key to a successful appeal to

the consumer and the creation o f modem consumerism See Colin Campbell, The

Romantic Ethic and the Spirit o f Modern Consumerism (London: Basil Blackwell,

1987), 48 See also T.J Jackson Lears, Fables o f Abundance: A Cultural History o f

Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); T.J Jackson Lears, ‘From

Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots o f Consumer

Culture, 1880-1930,’ in The Culture o f Consumption: Critical Essays in American

H istory, ed T J Jackson Lears and Richard Wrightman Fox (New York: Pantheon

12 See Lancaster, The Department Store; Michael B Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois

Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1981); Williams, Dream Worlds; William R Leach, ‘Transformations in a Culture o f Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925,’ The Journal o f American

20 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 th C ENGLAND

modem advertising, and department stores—encouraged consumer culture and shopping as an increasingly time-consuming activity, especially for middle-class women

Modem consumer culture, particularly the connection between image and goods and the participation in shopping as a major pastime, does not begin with either the Crystal Palace or the emergence of department stores, which both had their origins in earlier forms Consumer culture did not remain stagnant between the consumer revolution of the later eighteenth century and the exhibitions, advertising, and shopping palaces of the later nineteenth century The vanguard shops of the late eighteenth century prepared the way for the bazaars, emporiums, and finally the department stores of the nineteenth century

Despite significant changes in eighteenth-century retail, most shop owners operated as petty shopkeepers usually assisted by a spouse and perhaps a single worker from outside the family The luxurious, fashionable shops of London’s retail centers represented the exception to that rule These relatively small businesses distributed the majority of English goods to consumers in the 1700s However, the histories of such small shops are difficult to trace.13 Unlike later department stores, such small businesses often left little record of their existence.14 Fortunately, advertisements and trade cards, small cards with the shop’s name, address, and type of business, provide a glimpse into the world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century retail trade

Women and Shopkeeping in the Late 1700s and Early 1800s

An example from the eighteenth century is the shop of Mary and Ann Hogarth in London Their beautifully illustrated trade card by their brother William Hogarth advertised their location and wares:

from the old Frock-shop the comer o f the Longwalk facing the Cloysters, Removed

to ye Kings Arms joyning to ye Little Britain-gate, near Long Walk Sells ye best & most Fashionable Ready Made Frocks, suits o f Fustian, Ticken & Holland, striped Dimmity & Flanel Waistcoats, blue and canvas Frocks, white stript Dimmitys

by Wholesale or Retail, at Reasonable Rates.15

History 71, no 2 (September 1984): 319-342; Elaine S Abelson, When Ladies Go A- Thieving: M iddle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1989).

13 Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England, 219-220 For the

family partnerships that often operated these businesses see Leonore Davidoff and

Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women o f the English Middle Class, 1780­

1850 (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1987), 193-315.

14 Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth Century England, 6 This dearth o f

records is also true for smaller shops in the nineteenth century.

15 Mary and Ann Hogarth, ‘Trade Cards,’ Box XII, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian,

Oxford See also Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, 239 who date this card from

the 1730s.

READY MONEY ONLY: SMALL SHOPS AND NEW RETAIL METHODS 21

In the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, women not only traded with their husbands, but also owned autonomous shops Married women operated independently, single women, and widows ran retail businesses Women also participated in retail as dressmakers In 1826 Mrs Tomlinson sent out a handbill to

‘the Nobility and Gentry’ to invite them to her dressmaking shop in New Bond Street, London Running a rather large shop at which ‘first rate French and English talent is constantly employed under her supervision,’ Tomlinson sold everything from ball dresses to hats and corsets.16 This common occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to decline in pay and status in the course of the nineteenth

Women participated in such trade despite the traditional common law principle

of coverture transferring a married woman’s property to her husband This trading could be accomplished by separating from the husband and hoping he did not find out about the business Alternatively, a woman whose husband deserted her could

get a protection order allowing her to trade as a femme sole Women could also

make legal pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements with their spouse that permitted them to carry on independent trade.17 Most common, however, especially in the eighteenth century, was the family run business with both spouses working in a partnership

By the nineteenth century, commentators complained that women once content

to serve behind the counter seemed more interested in consuming goods than selling them In 1817 Priscilla Wakefield protested: ‘ for what tradesman would venture to burden himself with a wife, who, by her mistaken ambition of gentility, would consume all the produce of his industry ’l8 An 1845 book on how to succeed in business warned prospective retailers: ‘a gentle considerate helpmate will cheer and assist him; a vulgar, dressy, ostentatious woman will be his ruin.’19 As gentility and middle-class status became more dependent on de­emphasizing the role of women in the household as producers20 and accentuating their role as consumers and displayers of goods, English society focused on

16 Mrs Tomlinson, ‘Women’s Clothing and Millinery,’ September 1826, Box III, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford See also Miss Smart, ‘Trade Cards,’ Box XII, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford, for a similar advertisement In the nineteenth century the image o f the oppressed seamstress worn out by overwork and poor pay overshadowed the earlier status o f dressmaking See The Dressmaker, ‘Trades and Professions,’ Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford This illustration is

o f a young woman worn out by close needlework and poor pay— pictured working by her candle at night See also Helen E Roberts, ‘Marriage, Redundancy, and Sin’ in

Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed Martha Vicinus (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1973), 58-63.

17 ‘Trading By Married Women,’ The D raper (London) 7 January 1870.

18 Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition o f the Female Sex (London:

Barton, Harvey, and Darton, 1817), 113.

19 C.B.C Amicus, How to Rise in Life (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans,

1845), 48.

20 See especially Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 314-315.

22 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19™ C ENGLAND

women as buyers rather than sellers In Trollope’s 1870 novel Brown, Jones and

Robinson, George Robinson describes his ideal wife: ‘I love to see beauty enjoying

itself gracefully My idea of a woman is incompatible with the hard work of the world I would fain do that myself, so that she should ever be lovely.’21 Although women still worked in retail trade, the era dominated by the small family run shop was disappearing

Another change in consumer culture along with the trend away from the small, family shop was the transformation of the geography of London shopping in the late 1700s and early 1800s London grew rapidly in the nineteenth century and with it shopping districts were bom, thrived, and fell More traditional shopping areas like Fleet Street, the Strand and Cheapside gave way to the primacy of the West End, at least in the category of upper-class and the best of middle-class shops.22 Numerous successful retail shops trace their origins to Regent Street and Oxford Street Peter Robinson, Debenhams, Marshall and Snelgrove, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Swan and Edgar are just a few of the shops tracing their beginnings to the early nineteenth-century boom of the West End.23 Most of these businesses began as drapery or haberdashery shops

Changing Geographies and Changing Scale

The West End

The West End, including Piccadilly, Oxford Street, Bond Street, and Regent Street, emerged as London’s and England’s preeminent shopping district by both evolution and architectural planning Old Bond Street, begun in 1686, long housed the elite shops of the aristocracy Later, when New Bond Street was added to its length, the old shopkeepers complained about the association with the new retail establishments Although not possessing the tradition of elite service of Old Bond Street, New Bond Street had its share of fashionable shops in the nineteenth century and benefited from the association between Bond Street and aristocratic shopping Bond Street, old and new, was also a center for theatres and circulation libraries in the nineteenth century.24

The area of Piccadilly in the West End, roughly the area between Coventry Street and Albemarle Street, now best known for the circus connecting the thoroughfares of Regent Street and Piccadilly, also emerged around the same time

as a retail center Throughout the eighteenth century the area of Piccadilly remained a haunt of the aristocracy, a place of fashionable shops and grand houses

21 Anthony Trollope, The Struggles o f Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One o f the Firm

(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), 136.

22 ‘Shopping in London,’ The Living Age 1, 4 (June 1844), 250.

23 Thelma H Benjamin, London Shops & Shopping (London: Herbert Joseph Limited,

1934), 159-176.

24 Ibid, 108-109.

READY MONEY ONLY: SMALL SHOPS AND NEW RETAIL METHODS 23

including those of the Earls of Clarendon and Burlington The famed grocers Fortnum and Mason originated in Piccadilly in 1708 and moved to their present site in Piccadilly in the mid-1800s.25

Regent Street, which crosses through Piccadilly Circus, was an intricately planned affair Intended to connect the Regent’s home at Carlton House with the newly dubbed Regent’s Park, this brainchild of Regency architect Thomas Nash changed the face of the West End Between 1818 and 1820 smaller streets and homes were swept away to accommodate this newer, wider street with its fine shops Nash even built colonnades from Glasshouse and Vigo Streets to Piccadilly

to shelter aristocratic shoppers and loungers Although some complained that the fashionable street provided a rendezvous for the debauched upper classes, others enjoyed the new shopping and entertainment opportunities it afforded.26

Along with fashionable loungers, Regent Street hosted many of the finest stores

of nineteenth-century London The men’s clothing firm of Messrs Nicoll and Company settled into the newly built street and became legendary for fine men’s clothing including serving among others, the Duke of Wellington When George Swan’s original shop was demolished to make way for Piccadilly circus, Swan reopened his drapery firm at numbers 9 and 10 Regent Street in 1821 Swan and his younger assistant William Edgar made over £80,000 during their first year in operation at the new address Hodge and Lowman, a successful drapery emporium, soon joined them in Regent Street at numbers 252-254 These shops sold material and accessories for clothing, fans, gloves, hats, umbrellas and even underwear.27Intended as the avenue of the fashionable, Regent Street also became the

thoroughfare of fashion in England John Tallis’s London Street Views from the

late 1830s describes it as a place of ‘palace-like shops, in whose broad showy windows are displayed articles of the most splendid description, such as the neighboring world of wealth and fashion are daily in want of.’ 8 In Regent Street one could buy almost anything including ‘every novelty in fancy manufactures’ from ‘Paris, Vienna, and Frankfort.’29 However, Regent Street, like Bond Street, began as the playground and shopping domain of the nobility and gentry Inevitably, the association of the West End with the best in shopping attracted

25 Arthur Dasent, Piccadilly in Three Centuries (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1920); A.M Broadley, Piccadilly 1686-1906 (London, 1906), 8 and 16.

26 Nicolls and Regent Street, ‘Women’s Clothing and Millinery,’ Box I, John Johnson

Collection, Bodleian, Oxford; Peter Jackson, George S ch arfs London: Sketches and

Watercolours o f a Changing City, 1820-50 (London: John Murray, 1987), 129 In 1848

the colonnades were destroyed at the request o f shop owners who feared the prostitutes and loungers underneath them discouraged respectable trade.

27 Nicolls and Regent Street, ‘Women’s Clothing and Millinery,’ Box I, John Johnson

Collection, Bodleian, Oxford; Hermione Hobhouse, A History o f Regent Street (London:

Macdonald and Jane’s, 1975), 48-50 and 95.

28 John Tallis, London Street Views, No 4, Regent Street (London: John Tallis, 1838­

40) 1.

29 T.A Simpson & Co., ‘Bazaars and Sales,’ Box I, advertisement from unknown source, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford.

24 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 th C ENGLAND

larger-scale stores with a somewhat wider clientele: the middling folk found their way into the West End

The wealth of the West End spread north to Oxford Street in the early to mid­nineteenth century By the late 1830s Oxford Street consisted ‘almost exclusively

of retail shops.’ At no 61, Messrs Williams and Sowerby offered ‘foreign velvets, satins, and fancy articles of the richest description.’ Buying directly from their suppliers, Williams and Sowerby were able to offer the height of fashion at a more reasonable cost According to John Tallis, this shop was nicknamed “ the Grande Centre of Distribution” by manufacturers on the continent.30 Oxford Street, Regent Street, and Bond Street were the center for elite retail trade, the envy of the rising middling classes, and the location for many retail innovations like emporiums and department stores—two types of retail establishments that placed aristocratic dreams of consumption within the grasp of the non-landed classes.Along with retail, the West End was an area of fashionable entertainment like the ‘picture’ shows of dioramas and panoramas including Barker’s in Leicester Square When tired of shopping, people could also visit the small museums such as Sir Ashton Lever’s One of the West End’s retail innovations, the Burlington Arcade, an architectural wonder that was part entertainment and part shopping avenue, was founded in the late 1820s.31

Arcades

One of the first signs of a shift in traditional retail culture in the early nineteenth century was the emergence of shopping arcades in London and other densely populated cities in England.32 These arcades combined aspects of the modern mall—the advantage of being weatherproof and providing a variety of proprietors under one roof—with characteristics of elite eighteenth-century shopping Despite their impressive arches and covered walkways, these arcades still consisted of separate shops with separate entrances and windows Most notable and perhaps the most successful of shopping arcades, the Burlington Arcade in London represented the arcade ideal with its convenient, clean, rainproof walkway guarded by beadles33 against the entrance of a non-elite public The Burlington Arcade, which still operates in its original location today, combined the high society shopping experience of late-eighteenth-century London with an indoor twist including shops with ‘bowed fronts looking for all the world like some quaint array of eighteenth

30 John Tallis, London Street Views, No 34, Oxford Street— Division II (London: John

Tallis, 1838-40), 1-2.

31 See E Beresford Chancellor, The West End Yesterday and Today (London: The

Architectural Press, 1926), 7-13; Erika D Rappaport, “ The Halls o f Temptation:’ Gender, Politics, and the Construction o f the Department Store in Late Victorian

London,’ Journal o f British Studies 35, no 1 (January 1996): 62.

32 Lancaster, The Departm ent Store, 8.

33 Named after the minor parish officials in English churches who kept order and ushered, the beadles o f the Burlington Arcade were a mixture o f private policemen and modem doormen.

READY MONEY ONLY: SMALL SHOPS AND NEW RETAIL METHODS 25

century opera boxes And then too the small squares of glass, such a relief from the great pompous expanses of plate glass [which] give a scale to the goods that they shield.’34 This haven for the wealthy shopper opened in 1819

Built between Burlington House and Bond Street in 1819 by Lord George Cavendish and designed by Samuel Mare, the Burlington Arcade quickly became the shopping haunt of fashionable London specializing in luxury goods and services.35 The Arcade housed a variety of traders including the famous P Truefitt, who advertised:

Ladies & Gentlemen’s

Fashionable Hair Cutter’s

‘Dyer’

Manufacturer o f

ORNAMENTAL HAIR

and Dealer in English and Foreign Perfumery.36

Truefitt suffered along with other Burlington Arcade shopkeepers in an 1836 fire The fire report reveals that in 1836 there were around sixty people trading in the arcade including a boot-maker, a bookseller, two hosiers, a milliner, a jeweler, and another hairdresser in addition to Truefitt At least two of the shops were reported

as being owned by unmarried women, ‘Miss Stamford,’ a hosier, and Louisa Asser, proprietor of the child-bed linen warehouse.37

The wide variety of retailers in the arcade may seem similar to that of modem covered shopping malls; however, the public nature of the arcade was tempered by its exclusivity The arcade emphasized fashion and genteel display under its arches Customers and would-be customers were aware of this emphasis In

Charles Dance’s 1839 play, The Burlington Arcade, a character explained the

importance of fashionable appearance in the Arcade: ‘I havn’t watched the Burlington Arcade so long without learning the principal ingredients in the formation of a dandy I’ll buy a pair of straw-coloured kid gloves—and a new hat—and a shirt front—and a satin stock—and after that, if I’ve money enough left, I’ll buy a coat, and a pair of never-whisper-ems.’38 The upper-class atmosphere of the Arcade was further assured by a patrolling beadle in full livery who made sure that only the well-dressed and respectable were allowed entrance

34 H.J.B., Burlington Arcade: Being a Discourse on Shopping f o r the Elite (London: Favil

Press, 1925), 18-19.

35 Ibid., 3, 13 See also Benjamin, London Shops & Shopping, 113-114.

36 P Truefitt, ‘Trade Cards,’ Box XII, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford

Satirized as a ‘Mr Wigton’ in Charles Dance’s 1839 Burletta The Burlington Arcade,

Truefitt represented the high service, luxury product, fashion-oriented purveyors for

which the arcade was known See Charles Dance, The Burlington Arcade; A Burletta, In

26 CRIME, GENDER AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN 19 C ENGLAND

In the play, Dance’s beadle character complained: ‘Now, I should be glad to be told what can be better known all over the whole world, than that people is not to wear pattens and spread umbrellas through the Burlington Arcade; and yet half of

my precious time is taken up in repeating on it.’ When he was not shouting at customers acting or dressing inappropriately, Dance’s satirized beadle spent most

of his time shouting at ‘dirty little boys’ to keep them out of the shelter of the Arcade.39

Although innovative in its architecture and the number of vendors it housed, the Burlington Arcade thrived on its reputation for exclusivity and luxury items— the heart of eighteenth-century aristocratic retail It remained popular for decades.40 George Augustus Sala, however, writing in 1858, mocked the outdated attention to aristocratic luxury goods and service in the Arcade:

I don’t think there is a shop in its enceinte where they sell anything that w e could not do without Boots and shoes are sold there, to be sure, but what boots and shoes— varnished and embroidered and be-ribboned figments Paintings and lithographs for gilded boudoirs, collars for puppy dogs, and silver-mounted whips for spaniels, pocket handkerchiefs, in which an islet o f cambric is surrounded by an ocean o f lace, embroidered garters and braces, fillagree boudices, firework-looking bonnets, scent bottles, sword-knobs, brocaded sashes, worked dressing-gowns, inlaid snuff-boxes, and kibalas o f all descriptions 41

Although Sala lampooned the non-utilitarian frippery of the Arcade’s wares, such status-announcing ‘useless’ goods, once associated only with the genteel classes, formed the foundation of middle-class consumer culture in the nineteenth century Shopping arcades brought the older, aristocratic individualized shopping for luxury goods into an innovative nineteenth-century form

Its imitators reflect the success of the Burlington Arcade in the early nineteenth-century Named in honor of Lord Lowther, Commissioner of Woods and Forests, the similarly styled Lowther Arcade opened in the Strand in 1830.42 However, no imitator surpassed the Burlington Arcade, that temple to the consumer culture of the wealthy just after the Napoleonic Wars With high quality goods and individualized service, the Burlington Arcade remained as it was designed: ‘ essentially intimate Here is none of the vast impersonality that characterises the mighty emporia of our vast cities; individual attention, and individual courtesy, and individual goods appeal to those for whom shopping is still a lingering delight, a delectable pastime ’43

39 Ibid., 12-13.

40 Leigh Hunt, A Saunter Through the West End (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861), 24.

41 George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock: Or The Hours o f the D ay and Night in

London (New York: Humanities Press, 1971 [1858]), 185.

42 ‘The Lowther Arcade,’ The Mirror o f Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, XIX, 541 (7 April 1832), 210; Chancellor, The West End Yesterday and Today, 69.

43 H.J B., Burlington Arcade, 21-23.

READY MONEY ONLY: SMALL SHOPS AND NEW RETAIL METHODS 27

The Innovations of Haberdashers and Linen Drapers

If the Burlington Arcade was the last great achievement of eighteenth-century aristocratic shopping, then we must look beyond its covered architecture for the beginnings of mass consumer culture in the nineteenth century to the firms that eventually transformed themselves into grand emporia and department stores The shops that most commonly gave birth to these larger stores were already in the vanguard of retail early in the century Haberdashers and drapers, particularly linen-drapers, experienced a healthy but increasingly competitive trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Their response to competition varied from increasing the volume and variety of products, to aggressive advertising, uniform open ticket pricing, ready-money sales, and new display techniques like window-dressing

Originally, haberdashers were small dealers who sold the odds and ends of clothing retail like trimmings, collars, threads, and the decorations associated with women’s dress In the City of London the Haberdasher’s Company was first incorporated in the mid-1400s Beginning as a subset of mercers dealing only in small items, their stalls were in Cheapside.44 By the early 1800s Haberdashers had their own shops like drapers and the larger shops employed assistants William Ablett, a draper and haberdasher, served as an assistant in one of these shops in early nineteenth-century London As a boy he worked until ten o’clock five days a week and until midnight on Saturdays He described his workplace:

[PJeople used to chagger and haggle about the price when they wanted to buy anything, and this healthy system o f sticking to one price was just coming into vogue, and was the means o f saving much time, ours being a pushing and ticketing shop; window dressing also was just then beginning to be made a great point of, and long alleys, and vistas o f goods were upon occasions arranged half down that side o f the shop where the shelves which contained the goods kept in wrappers, and which were least likely to be wanted or disturbed were kept.45

Although using new techniques like fixed, marked prices and using the shop’s small windows to display goods, this shop was in many ways still like an eighteenth-century establishment with many goods wrapped in parcels and difficult

to reach

Haberdashers’ shops similar to that of Ablett’s employer and Mrs Moore in Grafton Street carried a variety of goods early in the century—a variety and volume that only increased as the century progressed.46 These early nineteenth- century haberdashers did not sell big-ticket items, but had to be familiar with many

44 ‘The Haberdasher’s Company,’ The D raper (London) 28 October 1870.

45 William Ablett, ‘Reminiscences o f An Old Draper,’ Warehousemen and D ra p e r’s Trade

Journal (London) 15 April 1872; William Ablett, Reminiscences o f An O ld D raper

(Sampson, Low, Marston, Seale and Rivington, 1876), 108.

46 See Moore, formerly Clarkson & Moore, ‘Women’s Clothing and Millinery,’ Box I, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian, Oxford.